


The etherealization of common sense

by middlemarch



Series: Plum dimension [5]
Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: American Civil War, F/M, Feminist Themes, Gen, Letters, Mathematics, References to Dickens, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-13
Updated: 2016-07-13
Packaged: 2018-07-23 20:42:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7479243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Venn diagram-- the hospital and the domestic sphere, what a woman allows and is allowed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The etherealization of common sense

Sometime in late October, after weeks of skirmishes instead of battles, as the days became noticeably shorter and cooler, people stopped expecting the War to end quickly. It had been a very long six months, that six months both sides had declared it would take to definitely vanquish the enemy. It stretched longer and longer, a bandage unwinding. Finally, collectively, they agreed: there was no denouement rushing towards them, no critical encounter that would allow them to return home. Jed was a little surprised it had taken the staff at Mansion House so long to admit the truth. They were familiar with the degree and number of injuries, not only to men’s bodies, but spirits and minds. Each side was implacable as a whole, though a man here and there would say, perhaps the soldier he fought hadn’t been so different, so worth killing. In the long hours of the night, broken by the arcs of the nuns’ shimmering lamps, boys would remember their homes and then the destruction of battle, would wish to retreat or unite, contrary to their regular opinion. With the dawn, the lines were drawn again, dark blue and butternut, though the nurses moved among the men equally. He could expect to find Mary tending a Confederate and though she would never admit to it, Emma had been known to fill a tin cup for a boy from Ohio and the man from Maine who was the father of six had had his plate filled by a Southern girl who “looked just like my oldest, my Suzy.”

Mary had organized it, of course. It seemed painfully clear to Jed why Miss Dix had promoted her over Anne Hastings’s despite the Englishwoman’s demonstrable experience; Mary had a drive to manage and arrange things unerringly in the direction of the greatest good and comfort. She was not interested in status or power, although Anne, passionately seeking both, could never accept it. Mary was willing to humble herself, to wash the filth of battle or general camp living from any soldier, to give up her bed for a visitor, to allow Anne to vent her spleen so that she might return, rejuvenated, to the care of the boys. He should have guessed that God would not send them what they anticipated; Summers was jaded and Hale had no imagination, but Jed felt he should have known better than to expect a great, corseted blonde Bavarian, bosom like a ship’s prow, ready to impose her Teutonic ideals and sentimentality on them all. 

Mary was purely New England, or what he knew of it—direct and industrious, virtue composed of a cool kindness and unexpected warmth, sharply intelligent, entirely modest. Truly, it was a wonder she had married but he admitted he had not known her before the War, what Miss Mary Phinney of Manchester had been like, only Mary von Olnhausen, though she let them call her all by the earlier name. Why, he often wondered, did she not correct them? What did it mean about her marriage, which Mary she felt she must be in Alexandria? Did she relinquish his name to set herself free or because she didn’t want to hear it mangled in the mouths of the staff and patients? For he had seen in that moment when he hurt her, she had loved her husband very much and still grieved for him. 

It had been a different kind of shame, living with his attempt at viciousness; he still shied away from facing that such a malicious urge lived within him, far worse than anything Anne Hastings had essayed. Mary’s convictions must include forgiveness just as fiercely held as Abolition, for he could not see how she would have otherwise accepted his apology so easily. What did she balance in him against that cruelty? Was it only enough that he was a Union officer, turning his back on his upbringing? Or were there other qualities, choices he had made that led her to see him as fundamentally good and honorable? He could not ask her these questions, the Executive Officer to the Head Nurse, nor even as a gentleman to a lady, but he could listen to her and watch her face as she spoke. He would become an expert in Mary and then he would not have to ask, though he would still want to for the pleasure of seeing her considering; he already knew there would be a little wrinkle on her brow and she would tuck in the corners of her mouth. If the topic absorbed her deeply, he would see a dimple in her right cheek and think no one had ever looked so winsome considering how many gallons of sorghum to order or whether to treat prostitutes with calomel.

He had more opportunity to observe her since she had assigned the back parlor to be the staff dining room and sitting room. Emma Green must have shared some secrets about where the Greens had stored more comfortable chairs and sofas. Mary had unearthed these and some little rosewood tables and a pair of brass lamps she’d polished until they glowed. There had even been a Turkey rug rolled up in some attic. Mary had spent a cathartic twilight thrashing the accumulated years of dust from the wool and Jed had very much enjoyed the impromptu display of her graceful form-- so much that he had offered to help Samuel Diggs move the rug from the line and lay it on the scratched floor. She left an assorted set of tea-things, cups and saucers, a milk-jug painted with wood violets, on a japanned tray. She had disguised the stout crockery tea-pot with a cozy he thought had been knitted from a dead soldier’s unraveled sock, based on the mottled blue color. Anne Hastings had cried out sharply the first time she’d come into the resurrected room, “Oh my word, whatever will she think of next? Shall we have a salon, Nurse Phinney? But then, where is the piano and the harp?” and had made a great show of poking a finger into the soft belly of each of the pillows Mary had placed on the worn sofa. They shone in the lamplight like the hyacinth flame of a Bunsen burner and he couldn’t place them at first. He realized she must have cut down her ruined ball gown to make them. What had that cost her? And what did she think when she saw them scattered against the sofa or cushioning this officer or that, the silk that had clung to her corset, fallen away over her hips touching men she treated with was complete formality? Did the memory of Aurelia’s agony and that surgery follow her into every evening? If it did not, how did she manage to forget? Perhaps it was only that she had become accustomed to seeing the silk reconfigured as so much was at Mansion House. A Baroness could become a housemaid, even a Magdalene washing the feet of the soldiers if it was requested. She had witnessed an autocratic belle transform into a comrade and then a friend and a commanding officer had wallowed in ignominious despair and raw desperation, his head laid in her lap like a sick child’s. To see the elegant ball gown as homely cushions was not so difficult. 

Within a week, maybe even less, they had all forgotten the room had ever been anything else and each had staked a claim. Nurse Hastings, for all her shrill blather and mockery, had commandeered the more feminine armchair in brown velvet and had fashioned an antimacassar all her own. The tatting edging it was delicate as an orchid’s frilled throat. Henry Hopkins made a little study with his prayer book and Bible and Henry Ward Beecher’s “Notes from Plymouth Pulpit,” a thick stack of foolscap and an ink-pot and started writing his sermons while he smoked a pipe after dinner; the room was sweet and blue with the smoke when he was struck with inspiration. Byron Hale liked to settle himself in front of a pile of newspapers and make a great fuss, rustling through the pages and reading bits aloud; nothing would stop him but Anne’s nightly exclamation which varied only in appellation from “dear Byron, do be quiet!” to “Dr. Hale, enough!” or even “‘Swounds! The angels wept, hush, Captain Hale!” Summers would snore through it all, untroubled, and Mary was steady at her own work at a table set with a lamp; she did needlework or attended to her administrative paperwork, inventories, logs and the like, when the room was more crowded. But there were nights she sat alone with him or when Henry Hopkins joined them and wrote furiously or dreamily in his corner, then she had other pursuits.

He discovered her preferences as he sat with her at the table with a medical journal to engage him or some Dickens to amuse himself when the day had been too grim. _The Old Curiosity Shop_ was a particular favorite though he also quite enjoyed _The Pickwick Papers_ ; they both seemed far away as the moon from the confines of Mansion House. After a few nights of quiet chuckling, he found he wished for something more stimulating and decided to begin writing up some of the more unusual neurosurgical cases he had encountered. Mary must have observed the difference, for those nights he spent working on the reports, she kept his cup full of fresh coffee and often the saucer held a biscuit or some slices of dried apple. He tried to thank her, but she shook her head at him and said, “It’s so little, I’d never serve you that at—I wish I had something better to give you.” And she’d sat back down in her own chair in a bit of a flurry, unusual for her, and hardly raised her eyes from her own work the rest of the evening.

Her own work was no longer the inventory of the medicine closet or repairing the buttons on Private Muller’s uniform jacket on those nights. She did not even bring out the embroidery she was making to repair a pair of footstools that had once been a small cottage garden of pink silk peonies and white hollyhocks trampled under booted feet. Mary had a mathematics text open most nights and filled page after page with figures Jed could not have made out even right side up, sometimes with passages in her slightly cramped cursive. He thought she was used to having limited spare paper to write on and must fit all her thoughts within the allotted space. Some of her books were thick, the oft-turned pages sighing silkily as she lifted one, then another. There were a few slimmer volumes but the contents were just as impenetrable to him. Occasionally, she wrote letters in German; he had glimpsed, “ _Meine geliebte Schwester Annaliese_ ” and “ _Es ist zu lange her_ …” and then he had looked away, not wanting to intrude though he was desperately curious. Her expression varied but he had not seen this spectrum before; he recognized the scholar’s intensity from his university days, the comfortable abstraction of thoughts that attended no immediate problem, a small delighted smile she wore when something unfolded for her or when she had found the word she wished. 

Jed wasn’t sure what night it was that they had sat together, papers strewn all over the table-top, that had led directly to the letter he received. He must have written some personal correspondence, gritting his teeth as he’d found something to say to his mother in a vain attempt to maintain the family tie and likely sighing quite a bit as he filled a page for Eliza with the briefest description of Mansion House and then all the pleasantries and platitudes that would allow her to share the letter with her parents and neighbors. He would have saved the response to Jonathan for the end, a dessert of sorts; there were always very interesting points to reply to, scientific questions to pose or to mull, and a healthy dose of Jonathan’s wonderfully wry humor. It could be some little glimpse of the operating theater or the style of Harvard men, even the professors’ wives invitations to teas with plain daughters or widowed sisters carefully put forward for Jonathan’s incurious perusal. He would not have noticed the abrupt change in the atmosphere with Anne Hastings’s arrival, not caught up in a recounting of the Allison boy’s torn eye socket, but Mary must have responded with alacrity, sweeping up the papers, his to one side, hers to another and quickly set a book upon them both, to preclude Hastings’s interest. He found Anne’s eyes skittered away from books or simply didn’t register them, with the exception of Godey’s. 

Just once, when he’d had _Little Dorrit_ open before him, Anne had commented, “Rather a milque-toast, Little Dorrit, hardly a pleasant escape from grim reality, Dr. Foster.” He couldn’t recall any specific conversation with Anne, no particular brashness or acid that etched his memory, so Mary’s ploy must have been effective, as she generally was with Hastings and so much else.

But there was an unintended consequence of her decision, for that was the only possible explanation he had for Jonathan’s latest letter. It had started regularly enough, the formal opening apologies for duration since the last exchange, inquiries about his health and a general, anodyne statement about the value of their long friendship. The next page or so had been in response to some surgical innovations they had been debating as Jonathan had more ready access to some papers from Paris. He was unprepared for the third page to start with some very complimentary lines about the mathematics paper Jed had included. Jonathan wrote, 

> “Frankly, I’m a bit in awe of you now, Foster! To think that in addition to all the good and demanding work you are doing in surgery and military administration, the latter alone I would not have considered your strong suit, old friend, you are making impressive strides in your new (I think?) study of mathematics. I can’t recall any particular interest in the foibles of integers in our past academic endeavors, but perhaps you concealed it or have only lately discovered the beauties of the field. I must admit, I could hardly make head or tail of the enclosed pages, but trading on our long friendship, I took it upon myself to share them with the esteemed Professor Peirce (whom I had recently met at yet another tea, interminable things, though the fried oysters were fresh and plentiful and the rusks not too dry). He sent round quite a laudatory review, commenting on the level of incisive detail, the brilliance and elegance of the presentation and the strength of the proofs. I think he may well send you an invitation to join his lecture during a furlough, or upon your discharge, inveigle you to a lecturer’s position or even a professorship, concerned you may otherwise hide your light under a bushel, so to speak. Should you like that—to sit in a ivy-scaled tower, to put down your scalpel and take up only your pen, to engage only with the finest mathematical minds in our young country? This War is a burden, a great wound we may never nationally recover from, but it would seem that personally, it is an effective crucible for your mind, Jed—what future refinements await? If you wish to correspond directly with Professor Peirce, you’ve only to let me know, as I fear any more of your work in that realm is wasted upon me. Now I shall return to the question of mesmerism and neurochemical induction, which we have been debating these many months…”

Jed sat back in the armchair he’d settled in to read the letter. At first, he was baffled by it; he could not recall writing Jonathan anything that resembled what his friend had described. He had no particular interest in mathematics, had studied the little that was required at the university, then happily let it all go to focus his energies on biology and anatomy. He couldn’t be said to even dabble in mathematics, let alone be seen to be an expert on par with Benjamin Peirce, who was obviously a Harvard professor of some renown based on Jonathan’s description. It was quite a puzzle for a few minutes, until it was suddenly, unequivocally, not. For he knew quite well that Mary devoted her scant leisure time to the study of mathematics, would sometimes even have one of her slimmer volumes tucked in her pinafore’s pocket to occupy her while she sat vigil over boys hovering near death or awaiting a visit from home. He hadn’t thought all that much of it other than to assume she was an archetypal Boston bluestocking, unusual only in that she had married; they were known to become absorbed in all sorts of academic pursuits, but more as followers, not leaders in their fields. Well, perhaps more of them could be recognized leaders, if ever anyone would allow them the recognition as it seemed the accidental inclusion of Mary’s notes in his letter to Jonathan had done. To think her work merited a Harvard professorship! He was very fond of Jonathan, but he couldn’t imagine his friend would have risked sharing the notes with the foremost professor of mathematics at Harvard if he knew they’d been written by a woman; Jed knew he had not thought her work could be of such high caliber, despite the ample evidence she had provided with her behavior. 

He would need to talk to Mary about it, that was undeniable, if only to apologize for her personal papers being shared with someone she had not intended. He tried to imagine what she would say. Would she own her remarkable intellectual prowess proudly or would she demur? He could hardly envision her angry at him, though if a similar circumstance had happened to Eliza or his cousin Delia, he thought they would rain condemnation on him for the simple accident. Would she be shy and duck her head, making little of her achievements? There was no precedent for that in any of her other undertakings but this situation matched little else that had occurred at Mansion House. Her mathematical endeavors were clearly ones she considered private and personal; she never took out a book if anyone was present save himself or Henry Hopkins, whom she seemed to regard as a sort of brother. The same could not be said of himself. What they were to each other—perhaps Mary could explicate, perhaps there was an equation he hadn’t studied that encompassed them. He told himself it was better not to know but he thought Mary would shake her head at that. It was not her way to look aside, to avoid, to fail to put forth a solution.

The opportunity to talk with her was not forthcoming however. Either the days had been so busy that the staff all retired to their rooms directly after dinner, to seek respite in sleep or solitude, or the relative lull induced them all to sit en masse in the officers’ lounge. Indeed, they did not even all retreat to their books and papers, but sat conversing about their homes, distant travels, the state of politics or shared stories of the patients. Jed could not say he entirely regretted an evening where Anne Hastings did not reference the Crimea even once, but spoke about London and Covent Garden. Hale was a lost cause, but in the more varied milieu, his inanity seemed more tolerable and one evening, when Mary proposed a change from the general conversation to the familiar recitations and musical performances of small family parties, they discovered he had a startlingly powerful tenor. The room rang with it and Hale was then not vapid or inept, but so very skilled, an unexpected bard. Jed noticed Anne wiped her eyes once or twice and Mary sat very still, a dreamy look on her face that made him wish they were alone though he recognized what a risk that would be.

A week passed, ten days. The evenings resumed their previous pattern—a few days of relative conviviality and then finally, a night when he found himself alone with Mary. Henry Hopkins was battling a mild catarrh and Mary had sent him to bed with a cup of chamomile tea and the threat of an onion poultice; Hopkins was a little rheumy-eyed but Jed saw the fond look he gave her. Jed thought Mary’s gentle clucking over his illness must remind Henry of home or some pleasant future he imagined, where Mary stood in place of the woman he wished was his own. The curtains were drawn against the night. Though they were only two in the room, there was a small fire merry in the hearth and the room was all circles of gold from the lamps and the fire, like overlapping ripples in a pond. She sat on the sofa, her dark skirts spread more widely around her and the tips of her brown boots peeked out just once before she drew them back. Before he could take the papers from the inner pocket of his coat, Mary spoke.

“Yes, Jedediah? What has you in such a state?”

“I don’t know as I’d call it a state, madam, but I must make an apology and then, I hope, an inquiry,” he replied.

“Well, certainly, do proceed. It is a rare occasion to be the recipient of Dr. Foster’s mea culpa,” Mary said. She was in high spirits this night but also possessed a rare contentment. The firelight brought out copper and bronze in her dark hair and her cheeks were flushed with the warmth of the room.

“You wound me, Mary, truly. However, I must sincerely tell you how sorry I am that I inadvertently included some of your own papers in a letter I sent to my friend Dr. Harris, up in Cambridge. That is, I believe that’s the case, these are yours, aren’t they?” Jed said, holding out the pages of mathematic notes to her. She took them in her hand and nodded, a little less bright now.

“Jonathan-- Dr. Harris believed the work was mine. He’s not much of a mathematician, so he sought guidance and shared them with a professor at Harvard. Professor Peirce, you may have heard of him, I think? The name is only vaguely familiar to me but it sounded as if he would be well-known in his own academic circles.”

“Yes, I’ve heard of him,” Mary said guardedly.

“He was very much impressed, this Professor Peirce, Dr. Harris was quite… effusive on that point. He’s not generally a very effusive person, Dr. Harris, much more measured and cautious than, for example, I am, so I paid particular attention to it,” Jed said, then paused. Mary looked at him steadily but didn’t say anything in reply.

“Does this surprise you?” he asked.

“That is your inquiry? I suppose, yes, I hadn’t thought anyone would be reviewing the work I was doing, so that is a surprise. It wasn’t my intention to share those papers,” Mary said.

“I do apologize for that, I would never purposefully violate your privacy—I’ve seen how careful you are about how and when you work on your mathematics. But, Mary, Professor Peirce’s commentary—are you pleased? Shocked? I don’t know quite what to make of you now,” Jed said. 

“I hardly see what has changed,” Mary said.

“You hardly see? Is this false modesty from you, Mary? I never would have expected that of you.”

“What do you expect me to say then, Jedediah? Should I be flattered that the leading professor of mathematics at Harvard has praised my work, but only because he thought you were its author? Should I be ashamed to be caught out in such unwomanly pursuits, some horrid chimera of a man’s mind in a woman’s form? This changes nothing for me… it is only another iteration of every encounter I have had about my intellectual interests. My work has value if I remain invisible, otherwise, it is all a great waste,” Mary said. He had never heard this bitterness from her before; it shaped every word, not just as she spoke but as she conceived the words within her mind. He had not imagined this—he had thought she would be lively and self-deprecating. When he looked at her, he saw the way the shadows fell from the fire and the lamps across her face, the depth of her eyes, the curve of her cheekbone sharply drawn by the way she held her mouth.

“I didn’t think,” he began and she, uncharacteristically, interrupted.

“No, you didn’t, did you? You didn’t think, all those nights when I sat beside you and worked, you didn’t think it would amount to anything. You looked at me indulgently even though you didn’t understand anything I read or wrote. You didn’t think it could be true when you first read the letter, did you, that your friend was serious, that it was not some… colossal joke, to tease you. You didn’t think what it would mean to me, to hear Professor Peirce admired my work but to know, to know without a doubt, he would never recognize me as the author. He would assume I was claiming a relative’s work, Gustav or my brother George, papers I’d found in my father’s desk, that I was a liar or a unnatural freak trying to prove the work was mine alone,” Mary finished. The firelight was still gold but her cheeks were bright red. 

“Mary! No one would think those things of you, I grant you Peirce would probably dismiss you but not with such… vitriol,” Jed said. 

“But I have already heard those things. It’s not conjecture or apprehension, Jedediah, there is no place for a woman who wants to learn what I do, who thinks as I do. You were amused by my endeavors when you thought I was solving simple puzzles, ones that do not interest you. But I saw the look on your face now when you knew it to be true, what your friend wrote—sooner would you expect little Plum to declaim in Latin,” Mary said. She closed her eyes a moment and brushed her hand across her face. Her expression shifted a little, became less acerbic. “You are not very interested in mathematics, I know, but do you wonder why I am? I would tell you if you wished.”

“Yes. Please,” Jed replied, having enough sense to say only that.

“I have always found such pleasure in the patterns number and shapes may take, the elegance of equations. Since I was a young girl, my parents could see I had a natural talent in that area but it was more than that. Mathematics, to me it is the most divinely beautiful field, the clearest evidence of God, the… the intersection of His mind in our world, like the vein of gold within the rock. Or, the way a crow’s black wing is suddenly rainbow-hued when the sunlight strikes it.” She smiled then, happy with how she had expressed herself, with the connections she drew between raw nature and the arithmetical refinements of the scholar. 

“Even when I cannot solve a problem, when the proof eludes me, I know without a doubt the solution exists and if I persevere, I may find it. There is nothing wasted in mathematics, the only waste occurs when our human minds cannot grasp the whole and so must approach it as… a mouse nibbling at the edge. Do you see the appeal?”

“I think I do,” he said. She was the vein of gold, he thought, though he could not say it.

“I thought you might. You have said such things about anatomy and physiology, the structure of the mind and its workings, the animation that renders us more than automata-- that have seemed so like to my own thoughts about mathematics. It seemed right that we worked side by side in the evenings, that our activities were supporting and reinforcing the other’s,” Mary said.

“You have worked this way before, then, perhaps?” Jed asked. He saw her in her home before the War, sitting beside her husband. There was pot of tea before them and each was scribbling away; her husband would have leaned over to brush a loose curl from her face and she would have given him such a sweet smile before she returned to her papers. It would be another kind of grief, to lose that companionship.

“No. There’s only been one other man who ever understood that Gauss and LaGrange meant more to me than Godey or Miss Edgeworth’s novels,” Mary said, finally setting the papers down beside her.

“And it was not your husband?” 

“No, Gustav was absorbed in his own work and we spoke of that or of other subjects that he preferred. He was very fond of Schiller and Goethe. He liked to read them in the evenings, a respite from his chemical machinations. I tried a few times to interest him in my work, but he didn’t care for that sort of thing, though he did not try to… redirect me to more womanly pursuits. No, my father understood, at least the form, if not the content. You see, he was a lawyer, a good one I think, but he loved the classics so, especially Ancient Greek. He always said the Latin poets were rather sedate, but the Greeks had found a way to harness the wildness of their minds without losing their elemental power. He understood how I could get… lost in my reading, trying to make my thoughts fit the mold of other, greater minds, trying to see what I could do that was only my own. He arranged for a tutor for me and it did help but I never told him how Mr. Sinclair would sigh and say what a shame it was my mind had been wasted on me, “wasted on a wee lass,” he say. He was from Edinburgh, Mr. Sinclair, and well you’d know it.” She explained matter-of-factly. It was nothing to her that there had only be one person in her life who had any idea of what she was capable of. He revised the vision of her marriage though he admitted many men, perhaps most men, would not have even indulged their wife’s interest in algebra or calculus as Gustav von Olnhausen had done.

“I don’t think your ability is wasted on you. I think the shame is that there is no avenue for you to further your explorations,” he offered. The disagreements he had had with his own father about a career in medicine instead of simply running the plantation seemed so small now. He had never truly doubted he would get his way; it was only how fierce the arguments would become before the resolution that he’d wondered about.

“It is perhaps the only compensation of being a widow, that I answer just to myself-- as a wife may not,” Mary said. He thought of how she had looked those earlier nights; she had had a curious combination of focus and utter relaxation. It occurred to him this was what mastery looked like, though he’d never expected to see it in a beautiful woman, in the midst of such misery and tedium. 

“There is such satisfaction in mathematics, everything a necessity, each figure equal and right when we discover the truth of it. It is a respite from our world, you see… How a man like Samuel Diggs is pushed to hide his ability, to only offer that which white people, even the most just, deem acceptable. How much we squander, we are improvident and profligate. Sometimes it seems to me God has given us this primer so we may appreciate how the world ought to work, it only we would pay attention,” Mary added.

She humbled him and did it well enough that he noticed when the thought occurred that she had been provided by God for that purpose, as if she was subordinate or accessory to him. He was not pleased to admit to himself that it was his natural inclination, to see himself as the center, everyone else moon to his planet, planet to his Sun. He thought of Mary’s joyful willingness to serve, Samuel Diggs’s patience in answering every task. Henry Hopkins never stood upon ceremony and would easily feed men, move furniture, and fetch supplies. Even Emma Green, raised to believe herself superior to every other woman, if not every man, knelt before a boy’s bed with a basin and offered a gentle smile as the boy apologized for the bile and vomit that had spilled over to soil her hands and clothes. Jed realized he’d thought quite well of himself for his sacrifice in staying at Mansion House; he’d comforted himself that Eliza had not appreciated how he did his Christian duty, his patriotic duty, upheld his Hippocratic oath. He accepted that what had driven him most had been Summers’s suggestion of the discoveries he might make, surgeries he couldn’t otherwise undertake. He saw his flaws in bright relief, as if it were not the firelight that shone upon them, but the full, frank light of a July noon. He was wanting in so many ways, far more ordinary than he had ever been willing to own. And yet Jonathan had put aside every bit of evidence that Jed hadn’t written those pages to assume it was so, because that was how the world was, how Jed himself was. It was not how he had to remain though. He had, at least, proved capable of change; he would not even tell Mary of the apprenticeship he would offer Samuel, that he should have offered weeks ago.

“What shall I write to Dr. Harris, Mary? What would you like me to say?” he asked. He would make no suggestion, give no order. He felt no better when he realized she was surprised by his tone, was genuinely waiting for her direction. He had given her insufficient reason to expect anything else.

“I suppose the truth is always the best, isn’t it?” Mary replied.

“Yes, but there are degrees, aren’t there? Shall I say only that the papers weren’t mine and leave it at that? Should I add I don’t want to discuss it or that I do know the author? Do you want me to tell my friend it was your work? And if I tell him that, do you want him to relay this to Professor Peirce? I will do whatever you want, Mary.” 

“Do you know, I really can’t say, Jed. I hadn’t imagined anyone seeing that work and now to imagine Professor Peirce reading it, to know that you are aware… it is something to ponder. Must you write back so quickly?” Mary said. 

“No, certainly not. My correspondence with Jonathan ebbs and flows with our work. There is no urgency,” Jed said. He paused, considering the options he’d posed and what else remained. “There is something else, another way. You might use a nom de plume or only your initials. You might conceal the details of your identity without engaging in any falsehood. It’s not without precedent.”

“There is that. Still, I will need to think on it. It is rather a leap, to go from working in solitude, with only my books as companions and guides, to sharing my progress with another… with someone expert, able to decimate a faulty proof with simply a glance at it.”

“Peirce is nearly prepared to offer me, to offer the paper’s author—you, Mary, a professorship! I don’t think he is looking to tear your work apart—though collaboration and spirited debate are both to be expected. You might be less… lonely if you corresponded with him. There would be someone who understood you in that way, a peer. Haven’t you missed that?” 

Jed could see her weighing the question; it would be the first time she had an equal, a comrade in her investigations. He remembered that first ease of talking with Jonathan, how they could match and surpass each other, well-paced; each neither exhausted nor bored the other. Stimulation was balanced by acceptance and recognition. Mary’s field was not widely studied even among men; she could never had had the experience he’d enjoyed with Jonathan since they met at the university so many years ago. He wanted it for her but she must desire it for herself. 

“Can I miss what I have not known? For that it what you are pointing out, isn’t it? That I should pass up an encounter, a relationship which might broaden me, allow me to become myself in ways I had not thought possible… a relationship that would challenge and delight me, if I dared to accept?” 

Mary looked at him as she spoke with those dark, serious eyes, oblique because she must observe propriety, because she was unsure of him as she was certain about ars mathematica. It had been this way before, this sudden doubling of the conversation. Sometimes it was like a mirror and other times, a shadow. What had started as jest, repartee and the formal flirtation not out of place at a public ball or Parisian salon, had deepened. Her voice took on a specific timbre, more lovely and stirring than Hale’s tenor, than any soprano he recalled from the Opéra de Paris. He had caught himself, more and more, imagining hearing that voice beside him in the night. It would become softer and richer if she were murmuring against his bare throat, her palm held against his heart. He would revel in it at first but what he wanted most was for it to be so familiar that he knew it as well as the tender skin of her wrist, the garden lavender on her hands and rinsed through her hair, her determined footsteps in the hall. He wanted it to be so ordinary he could squander its treasure and stop her sweet red mouth with his kiss, ardent or tender, an enchanted prelude or affectionate conclusion. Was this longing for her another waste, what dropped from the artist’s chisel, or was it held in abeyance, ready to be transformed, as the sculpture itself waited to be revealed from within the gleaming marble? It did not seem a question to be posed or answered.

“I think you have understood my meaning,” Jed said. He was not hesitant but he made no demand.

“I understand nothing,” Mary replied. He looked at her sharply and saw how her hands trembled in her lap. He hadn’t thought to hear that hopelessness, grief and yes, some frustration. The clock on the mantle chimed the hour—it was late and she was tired. He was tired too and the empty night seemed endless but he knew the dawn would come too early. 

“That is why I study, why I must apply myself, to understand. Comprehension is everything—it comes easier for me in mathematics, but I am not restricted in what my mind may grapple with. These evenings, I hope there will be more of them, if that is not too forward to say. I should like someone else, I should like you beside me, Jedediah. And perhaps, together we will see things with more clarity.”

It was not quite a smile, the expression on her face that she shared with him but he loved what it had of a smile and what it did not—that unflinching intelligence, the strength of her kindness, the patience of the scholar. Surgery could last hours, but it was made up of so many small actions strung together; he could survive it with brilliance and bravado. But Mary was a veteran of many proofs and she knew the value of stamina, of the faith necessary to wander without a defined path but with the confidence that there was a way, a wide thoroughfare or the faintest track through a dreadful wood. Mary could find it.

“I should like that. It’s late though, it’s time we were in bed,” he said. All his cleverness and worldliness fled for an instant as he heard what he had said and he felt himself blush like a schoolboy when she laughed aloud in surprise.

“Oh, Jedediah, don’t—you’re right.” And as she handed him a small lantern to light the way up the stairs, he felt her pat his arm and brush beside him, the touch of her skirts at his hip. He was glad to walk behind her into the night she shared with him; glad, this once, not to see her face.

**Author's Note:**

> The return of math!Mary, this time, knocking off Jed's socks with her awesome ability! This has the whole mistaken identity/Cyrano thing going on, but through a lens of math and feminism. Jed has this very impressed-with-himself vibe that I wanted to mess with while also ending romantically. And getting Samuel the apprenticeship he deserves. It's a bit meandering and I think Mary herself would discard it as an inadequate proof, but I'm still offering it up. And yes, The Pickwick Papers is an oblique nod to Little Women and their newspaper.
> 
> The title is from William Thompson, 1st Baron Kelvin, describing mathematics. As for the rest:
> 
> Benjamin Peirce (/ˈpɜːrs/;[1] April 4, 1809 – October 6, 1880) was an American mathematician who taught at Harvard University for approximately 50 years. He made contributions to celestial mechanics, statistics, number theory, algebra, and the philosophy of mathematics. After graduating from Harvard, he remained as a tutor (1829), and was subsequently appointed professor of mathematics in 1831. He added astronomy to his portfolio in 1842, and remained as Harvard professor until his death. In addition, he was instrumental in the development of Harvard's science curriculum, served as the college librarian, and was director of the U.S. Coast Survey from 1867 to 1874.
> 
> Maria Edgeworth (1 January 1768 – 22 May 1849) was a prolific Anglo-Irish writer of adults' and children's literature. She was one of the first realist writers in children's literature and was a significant figure in the evolution of the novel in Europe.[2] She held advanced views, for a woman of her time, on estate management, politics and education, and corresponded with some of the leading literary and economic writers, including Sir Walter Scott and David Ricardo.
> 
> Godey's Lady's Book, alternatively known as Godey's Magazine and Lady's Book, was a United States women's magazine that was published in Philadelphia. It was the most widely circulated magazine in the period before the Civil War. Its circulation rose from 70,000 in the 1840s to 150,000 in 1860. In the 1860s Godey's considered itself the "queen of monthlies". The magazine is best known for the hand-tinted fashion plate that appeared at the start of each issue, which provide a record of the progression of women's dress. Publisher Louis Godey boasted that in 1859, it cost $105,200 to produce the Lady's Book, with the coloring of the fashion-plates costing $8,000. Almost every issue also included an illustration and pattern with measurements for a garment to be sewn at home. A sheet of music for piano provided the latest waltz, polka or galop.
> 
> Henry Ward Beecher (June 24, 1813 – March 8, 1887) was an American Congregationalist clergyman, social reformer, and speaker, known for his support of the abolition of slavery, his emphasis on God's love, and his 1875 adultery trial. Henry Ward Beecher was a prolific author as well as speaker. His public writing began in Indiana, where he edited an agricultural journal, The Farmer and Gardener. He was one of the founders and for nearly twenty years an editorial contributor of the New York Independent, a Congregationalist newspaper, and from 1861 till 1863 was its editor.


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